What appears to motivate scientists to want to become a scientist?

Click on the videos below to hear about what motivated these academics to want to become scientists.

There was the natural history university museum, [in Oxford] and certainly I went there often as a child.

I always liked the level of uncertainty that was inherent in it [Geology]. There was a lot of stuff to really get your teeth into because the answers weren’t known.

He, [the neighbour] was in chemical sales… I got some insights from him, and he helped me a bit with physical chemistry… if I got stuck on a problem.

I was just working with a brilliant mind… who gave me a lot of freedom and a lot of space to develop.

…being a scientist, to me, means you want to know why?...you… want to understand why something is the way it is.

I wanted to go to foreign countries and… study the animals and… that kind of thing. So when we went abroad on holiday… I take my little notebook and try and find animals and do all this kind of stuff.

…going and exploring things for myself by reading about it or just like looking around, looking at the environment in the garden or something going to a museum or something like that, I found that really useful.

...it’s the challenge more of trying to understand all this and trying to take the next steps in understanding.

…where I grew up, because it was a rural area, there was a lot of concern locally… pollution from Sellafield. There were always people worried about that. Because I grew up on the Solway Firth but on the Scottish side of the Solway Firth... there was always stuff in the news at that time about, the local news, leakage of radiation…

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